Radim Jančura – founder and head of Student Agency, the Czech Republic’s most popular transport company

If you happen to have travelled between Prague and Brno on the D1 motorway
in recent years, you might have wondered why those large yellow buses
running between the two cities have Student Agency written on them. If you
thought that Czech students travel more frequently than in other countries,
you were wrong. Student Agency, now a multi-billion business, is the Czech
Republic’s most popular transport company. In this edition of Czechs
Today, we talk to Radim Jančura, its founder and sole owner.

The signature yellow buses of Student Agency have been running between
Prague and Brno since 2004, and have since become the second largest road
carrier in the country. But they are repeatedly voted the most popular
transportation provider and regularly win the Top Czech 100 award in their
category. Radim Jančura founded Student Agency in the south Moravian city
of Brno in 1993 as an au-pair agency, and the company eventually became the
largest au-pair firm in the world!

“It was quite easy. The au-pair business was really done by smaller
agencies. Most people went to the UK, as there were few other options, and
only citizens of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary were allowed in
the UK. And we managed to get the au-pair business to almost substitute
education. If you did not manage to get to university, lost a boyfriend or
had problems in the family, you would leave as an au-pair. We were sending
off three or four thousand girls a year, which was not that many but since
no one else did it on such a large scale, we ended up being the world’s
biggest au-pair agency.”

That was the 1990s. Since then, the Czech Republic and other central and
eastern European countries joined the EU and the demand for au-pair
programmes gradually dropped. Radim Jančura says though that with Czechs,
the programme is still popular.

“Au-pair programmes today are more or less a dead product. Czechs keep
going but Slovaks lost interest – as soon as we joined the EU, Slovaks
now tend to get jobs there rather than being au-pairs. I think there is a
difference in motivation – Czechs know that when they come back home
speaking English, they will be able to find interesting jobs here. Slovaks,
on the other hand, want to go abroad, make money there and maybe settle
down. So the number of Slovak au-pairs dropped to almost zero; in the Czech
Republic, the numbers have been more or less steady, and it’s become a
popular way of living abroad cheaply and safely.”

Ten years after Student Agency was established, yellow buses first
appeared between the two biggest cities in the country. Other destinations
soon followed, and today the company serves around five million clients a
year. Still, bus transport around the Czech Republic and Europe is not the
major focus of Student Agency. The company is the biggest Czech flight
tickets seller. And it’s growing despite the global economic downturn –
or possibly because of it.

There is no limit to Radim Jančura’s ambitions. Looking for gaps on the
market, he turned from road to rails. Czech Railways do not have the best
reputation: after decades of neglect, their trains are often old and shabby
and tend to be notoriously late. Student Agency has come up with a project
to launch yellow express trains. To do that, the company is pairing up with
a foreign partner.

“This is a huge project that we are undertaking with a French partner,
Keolis, which is the second largest private transport group in Europe. What
we want to do is to offer the state and the regions far better services:
new and modern trains. But most importantly, we’ll ask for much lower
subsidies and we’ll save the state and the regions a few billion
crowns.”

Czech Railways are naturally not happy about these plans, and Radim
Jančura says they also have to face opposition from those who should be
glad trains will cost less – politicians.

“There is of course a problem that many politicians don’t like the
idea very much. It’s not that they want to protect Czech Railways and
their employees – we will need the same conductors and engine drivers. We
will also maintain the trains much better so we will need many more people
in repair pits, but unfortunately some people want to maintain the monopoly
of Czech Railways forever.”

I always wondered how people who don’t know about Mr Jančura’s
company feel when getting on a bus that says Student Agency. It was of
course originally an agency for students, but it now has around 1,000
employees and an annual turnover of more than four billion crowns. Has
Radim Jančura ever thought of changing the company’s name?

“We first thought of changing the name of the company some five or six
years ago but even then it would have been very expensive to do so. Also,
we did not want to lose a brand that had a good reputation. So in the end,
we decided to establish anther company – Orbix. This is in fact a rival
company for Student Agency which focuses on corporate clients. The main
problem at that time was that businesspeople – we cater to huge
multinational corporations – should fly on a ticket from Student Agency.
Today, with the financial crisis, people might even brag about it, but then
it would have been strange to fly business class on a ticket from some
student company.”

A native of the northern city of Ostrava, Radim Jančura came to Brno to
study. He founded his company when still at university, and is to this date
the sole owner and director. And he plans to stay in the Moravian capital.

“Prague is a beautiful city, but mainly for tourists. Living there is
much worse than living in any big city in the Czech Republic. Brno is ideal
because it’s almost as big as Prague but life here is much easier, and
especially having a company here. The unemployment rate here is higher than
in Prague, so labour is cheaper. There are many students in Brno, it’s
become a student city, and there are lots of graduates which is great for
the future. Masaryk University is bigger now than Charles University in
Prague. So Brno is really on its way forward, and it’s a city of the
future.”